Shift

At the start of this unsuspenseful alternative history thriller from TV screenwriter and producer Kring (Heroes) and Peck (Body Surfing), 1,963 people see an apparition of an oversized flaming boy in the Dallas sky at 11:22 a.m. on December 30, 2012. These numbers correspond to the year, month, and day of President Kennedy's assassination. Flashback to Cambridge, Mass., in October 1963: an attractive woman in the pay of the CIA seduces Harvard grad student Chandler Forrestal, a nephew of Truman's defense secretary, so she can slip him some LSD. The Company believes the drug allows those who take it to access a secret part of the brain known as the Gate of Orpheus. The authors score points for originality in mixing LSD with the events and usual suspects, including the Mafia and J. Edgar Hoover, leading up to Dealey Plaza and the fatal day, but their implausible hidden history of how the world works never coheres. (Aug.)